Category: podcasts

podcasts

PubliCola on Hacks and Wonks: Mayoral Polling, Council Vacancy, Graffiti Crackdown, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

I had the pleasure of guesting on Crystal Fincher’s Hacks and Wonks podcast this week, where we talked about the city’s relentless focus on graffiti (because there are simply no other issues that need addressing), the appointment process for the city council’s most recent vacancy, a recent poll that attempts to paint mayoral candidate Katie Wilson as a “loud,” “angry” radical with no core convictions, and more.

Two of these stories are ultimately about the cynicism of local politics. The council appointment process, which used to involve a real debate among council members about which applicant was best for the position—with sometimes surprising results—has now become a pantomime of transparency, with one or, at most, two frontrunners chosen in advance.

Although mainstream media outlets routinely start their stories about council vacancies by saying something like, “You could be the next city council member,” that simply isn’t true. You, in fact, can’t be the next city councilmember, unless you have relationships with a majority of the council and they are predisposed to support you.

Moving on, we also discussed Republican City Attorney Ann Davison’s successful effort to get a bill allowing new civil fines for graffiti to move forward. (It passed committee this week, with amendments from Rob Saka making it harsher and more sweeping).

As we also discuss on a forthcoming episode of Seattle Nice, the basis for council members’ claim that prolific graffiti taggers are “well-heeled” white men in their 30s with “careers” consists of data from two sources. First, the five-year average of graffiti referrals to the city attorney’s office shows that of the average 43 people with misdemeanor graffiti referrals every year, 85 percent (36) are men and 79 percent (34) are white.

The claim that taggers are well-off comes from an even smaller source—17 people who were prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor’s office on felony graffiti charges. Of those 17, a majority were not indigent and eventually were able to pay restitution. But not qualifying as indigent and being “well-heeled” are two very different things. A single person making more that $19,562 a year has to pay for their own attorney—a level that hardly justifies the assumption that taggers are middle-class, based on a sample so small it’s closer to anecdote than statistic.

Addiction, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Sara Nelson Proposes Funding Treatment With New Public Safety Sales Tax

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s podcast, Sandeep and I discussed Council President Sara Nelson’s “Pathways to Recovery” resolution, which—if passed—will commit up to 25 percent of a planned local sales tax increase to addiction treatment services.

Flanked by treatment providers and business representatives, along with more politically outré groups like The More We Love and We Heart Seattle, Nelson announced the proposal last week. At a press conference in Pioneer Square, the council president—who’s up for reelection this year—said she was committed to funding treatment of all kinds with the 0.1 percent tax increase, which is expected to raise more than $35 million a year.

The state legislature gave cities and counties the authority to pass the sales tax for public safety earlier this year.

We took a close look at what the council president is proposing to fund and the backroom politics swirling around the proposal (including Mayor Bruce Harrell’s tepid response). And we discussed at how this proposed new public spending fits into the city’s overall budget picture and priorities.

The public safety funding doesn’t have to go to police, and it does not include any rules against “supplantation,” meaning that the city could use it to fund existing public safety programs and free up that money for other services. King County is considering its own 0.1-cent sales tax increase that could theoretically free up county funding for human-services programs most at risk from local funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts.

Sandeep and I agreed that if the city is going to increase the sales tax—a regressive tax that falls hardest on the poorest Seattle residents—it should all go to expanding treatment options, not more funding for cops.

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However, given city officials’ current fervor for hiring more police, it seems likely that any plan Harrell proposes for the tax will include new funding for SPD, even if Harrell agrees to some amount of treatment funding. There’s also the question of what kind of treatment will get funded with the potential windfall. The presence of many evidence-based treatment providers and referral agencies—including Evergreen Treatment Services, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and Purpose, Dignity, Action—offered some reassurance that Nelson’s plan will help people with addiction, rather than funneling more city dollars to high-barrier programs.

We also debated whether the city’s projected $250 million revenue shortfall really represents a budget shortfall of that size. Sandeep argued that the city has tons of money left over at the end of every year, while I cautioned that declining revenues (from sources like the JumpStart payroll tax and taxes on real-estate sales) represent a real problem regardless of whether city departments could, and should, spend their budgets more effectively.

The mayor and city council will likely take up the sales tax proposal as part of their budget discussions this coming fall.

podcasts

Seattle Nice: Is It Time to Admit the King County Regional Homelessness Authority Is a Bust?

By Erica C. Barnett

In a Seattle Nice episode that’s already earning raves like “Depressing!” and “God damn it!,” we discussed the past, present, and future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, an agency established with the lofty goal of rebuilding the region’s homelessness system from the ground up.

The KCRHA, which came out of discussions in the late 2010s about the need for a (say it with me) “regional approach to homelessness,” was supposed to bring King County and its 39 cities together and reach a consensus on the most effective approach to homelessness, then rebid the entire homelessness system to fund only the most effective programs, using money that would come not just from the city and county but other King County cities where homelessness is rampant, including the ones that have historically opposed homeless services inside their borders.

Things didn’t pan out that way. Early missteps, resistance from suburban leaders, and the failure of a heavily hyped public-private partnership that focused the agency’s attention on downtown Seattle (about as far from “regional” as you can get) set the KCRHA back in its early years, and the promised “total system rebid” never materialized.

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Now, the agency is essentially an administrative body responsible for administering existing contracts and taking on political blame (and legal risks) when something goes wrong. And its staff, including the CEO, answer directly to politicians pursuing their own parochial interests, leaving the agency vulnerable to unilateral decisions by elected officials—like when Mayor Bruce Harrell began clawing back control over homeless services, starting with outreach and homelessness prevention.

With the news last week that the KCRHA is threatening to cut one-fifth of its staff if they don’t get $4.7 million this year to increase their administrative budget, the agency’s future feels more tenuous than at any point in its brief history. (It doesn’t help that the threatened cuts are tanking morale that was already low, or that the infighting between the agency’s top leaders has become an open secret).

So will the KCRHA end up being a short-lived experiment, like the Seattle Monorail Project? Or is it, as some have argued, too big to fail? Sandeep and I discuss all that and more on this week’s show.

 

City Council, King County, Mayor Harrell, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Assessing the Assessor, Moore Faces the Urbanists, and Seattle Hates Nightlife

 

By Sandeep Kaushik

(Note from Erica: Ordinarily, I write about what’s happening on the podcast myself, but I couldn’t beat Sandeep’s blurb this week. I recorded this podcast from the back seat of a rental car parked on a dead-end road outside New Orleans during a torrential thunderstorm, so forgive any audible raindrops.)

On this week’s Seattle Nice podcast: With David away for a second consecutive week, Erica and Sandeep seek out the inimitable Josh Feit, news editor of the Stranger back in the olden (golden) days, to buffer their conversation with convoluted references to 50-year-old Joni Mitchell records.

We start with the increasingly off-putting saga of King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson, who remains defiant in the face of a unanimous vote by the King County Council (minus the absent Reagan Dunn) urging him to resign over allegations he stalked his ex-partner during their breakup from hell. We ask: Why did the resignation calls take so long, and are we headed for a messy recall? (Hours after we taped this episode on the morning of Friday, June 13, a judge denied Wilson’s legal motion seeking the dismissal of his ex-partner’s protection order against him.)

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Next up, Josh keys off the announced resignation of Councilmember Cathy Moore to argue that what Moore and her supporters and backers decry as incivility in Council chambers is really just sour grapes about the rising voice of an emerging urbanist majority. But are the urbanists so ascendant, give the status quo nature of the comprehensive plan they’re currently debating to death?

Finally, we dig into the implications of Erica’s reporting that the mayor is seeking to expand the city’s powers to shutter “nuisance properties.” Is a crackdown on clubs warranted by recent incidents of gun violence that have occurred outside nightclubs and hookah lounges? Or is this just the latest iteration of a long, pinch-faced tradition in Seattle municipal politics of finger-wagging at—and passing laws to curtail—the city’s nightlife?

Better listen in before a Big Yellow Taxi comes to take Josh and Sandeep away!

 

podcasts

Hacks and Wonks Podcast: New Info in Police Chief Investigation, Cathy Moore Says Sayonara to Council, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

I was this week’s guest on the Hacks and Wonks podcast, where host Crystal Fincher and I talked about the news of this very news-heavy week, including the news that City Councilmember Cathy Moore is stepping down and the latest revelations from the investigation that led to the firing of former police chief Adrian Diaz late last year.

As I reported earlier this week, newly released investigation documents, including interview transcripts, recordings, and handwriting samples, add more evidence to the case that Diaz hired and promoted a woman with whom he was allegedly having an affair, Jamie Tompkins. (Tompkins resigned before the investigation was complete and stopped cooperating with investigators; she’s since sued the city, alleging harassment.)

Tompkins has promoted an alternative version of the rumors about her relationship with Diaz—a conspiracy that involves forgery, planted evidence, coordinated false testimony from all three of Diaz’ security staff, and police officers following Diaz surreptitiously around the county, forcing him to sweep his car and office for “bugs” and switch vehicles frequently to make himself harder to track.

I mention these details not to say that they’re individually implausible, but to contrast them with the story that investigators found likely to be true: That Diaz had an intimate relationship with Tompkins, that he created a new position for her (with duties that were unclear to others at SPD), and that both of them lied about it to investigators—which, for Diaz, represented a serious form of police misconduct, for which he was fired.

We also talked about City Councilmember Cathy Moore’s announcement that she’s stepping down and what that means for the council; King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson’s refusal to leave his position or drop out of the King County Executive race despite credible stalking and harassment allegations against him; and former city councilmember Kshama Sawant’s entrance into the race against US Rep. Adam Smith (D-9).

Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Addiction, podcasts

Seattle Nice: New Hope for Fentanyl Users

By Erica C. Barnett

A new way of administering buprenorphine—a gold-standard medication that combats opioid addiction by reducing the need to use drugs like fentanyl to function—is helping people reduce their fentanyl use without the painful withdrawals that keep many users away from other versions of the medication.

The Downtown Emergency Service Center started using the new injection protocol on a pilot basis last year. It’s less complicated than other methods (like taking sublingual films every few hours) and doesn’t require people to “kick” opioids before starting treatment, making it easier for people to keep using it.

The new protocol, which we discuss with three special guests from DESC this week, has dramatically increased the number of patients who return for their second monthly injections, an important milestone that shows people are staying involved with treatment. People with severe substance use disorders, particularly those without housing, face many hurdles to long-term recovery, but often the first step to stability is escaping a cycle of dependency that can be all-consuming.

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Seattle elected officials have become fond of fantasizing about changing laws to make it easier to involuntarily commit people whose drug use occurs in public to mandatory treatment. But as our guests told us, the issue is not that people don’t want to quit.

“One thing that this protocol is showing is that so many people don’t need to be forced into treatment,” DESC medical director Richard Waters told us. “They will come running to it when they have awareness that what’s being made available is better than what they had been familiar with before.”

Our guests this week are DESC director Daniel Malone, medical director Richard Waters, and registered nurse Penelope Toland.